How Musk’s Super-voting Shares Lock in His Control of SpaceX

The Wall Street Journal and Reuters contributed to this report.

Elon Musk is about to take his grip on SpaceX even further.

The company’s IPO filing lays out a dual-class share setup that gives Musk outsized control, and that has kicked up an old Wall Street argument all over again: who really gets to run a company once it goes public?

The short version is pretty simple. SpaceX will have two classes of stock. Class B shares come with 10 votes each. Class A shares get just one. Musk is set to hold a majority of the higher-vote Class B shares after the offering, which means he will still be the one calling the big shots even if outside investors pile in.

That kind of structure is not rare in corporate America, especially at founder-led companies. But it drives governance watchdogs up the wall. Their complaint is straightforward: if one group gets more voting power than everyone else, shareholder democracy starts to look a lot less democratic.

Supporters see it differently. They argue that founders with big ideas need room to think long term without getting hammered by short-term market noise. And in Musk’s case, a lot of investors seem ready to accept that bargain. He has a track record of building huge businesses, and his companies have an almost gravitational pull on public attention.

Still, there are plenty of skeptics. Some worry he is spread too thin across too many high-profile ventures. Others think the whole point of going public is accountability, and that this setup does the opposite.

The debate is not new, and it is not going away. Companies like Alphabet, Meta, Palantir, Strategy and Berkshire Hathaway also use multiple share classes. But Musk’s version feels especially extreme because it fits his whole style: maximum control, minimum interference.

For investors, the question is whether that is a dealbreaker or just part of the price of getting in on one of the biggest and most talked-about companies on the planet.